The feeling of being conscious of the weight of my heart and lungs the morning of my departure for Iraq remains with me, more so than any image or smell. It is a mood I struggle to name, for it is not one that could have been called anticipation, anxiousness, excitement, or worry, although it included elements of each. My heart raced, and though I had no one to say goodbye to, I wished I did.
Strange, this wish to feel heartache.
I envied my friends for the arms around their necks and the tears shed for them by misty-eyed wives and girlfriends. Years later, having returned to Iraq for my second tour, I received a manila envelope myself as several of these men would; stamped with a lawyer’s return address. But at the time I could not know what was to be, and so stood alone, unjaded, quietly empathizing.
It seemed as though the sun itself decided to take a longer route to work that day. Time moved in slow motion, but move it did, and the crisp, clear morning turned to day. This day, the culmination of months of late nights crawling through cold, red North Carolina mud, of firing countless rounds through machine guns and pistols and rifles, of threading through pitch-dark forest trails in the cramped confines of our Humvees until the green and depthless static of our night vision goggles screamed inside our brains, had come at last. No longer could we rely on the tacit reassurance that after our imagined deaths, we would be resurrected to participate in the next exercise. The long-awaited day’s weighty presence hung about our shoulders like a lead blanket.
My thoughts echoed in my skull the same way our speaker truck broadcasts had reverberated through the pockmarked walls of the mockup villages we’d patrolled with the Marines in California’s desert country, the same men with whom we were about to be reunited in Iraq.
Had we gotten enough of the shooting ranges, battle drills, and medical training to fully arm us with the skills we needed to survive?
No amount of training had saved the lives of the dead men from the company we were ordered to replace. Everything seemed to be over too quickly. The enemy, unlike the role-players we’d been fighting, would not shoot paint rounds in Iraq’s desert, and I wasn’t convinced we were absolutely prepared to face real insurgents.
How were we to tell friend from nonuniformed foe, anyways, in the streets and alleys, among the crowds?
Until recently, it had all seemed like a game. I had followed the television’s news reports with a distant interest until the deaths of people I knew shattered my cold indifference, but even then the war still never felt genuinely personal. Now, suddenly, it dawned on me that my name might one day soon be one of those printed in some small corner of my hometown newspaper, among the dead. The truth of danger loomed, inevitable, and I had still so many questions.
As reality sank in, a fog of doubt and shock muted the sounds around me. I stood in a tan sea of camouflage uniforms before the loading docks of our offices, a speck in the massed formation of the company, following commands as a robot would. After the prerequisite cliché-filled speeches from our leaders about fulfilling our place in history and serving the nation, we dispersed in search of one last hug to tide us over through the months ahead. I loaded my swollen duffle bag under one of the two glistening charter buses that had pulled into the parking lot behind us and climbed into a rear seat.
I watched my buddies crane their necks around the tall seat backs as they peered from deeply tinted windows, trying to pick out which of the waving hands outside was meant for them. Soon distance made their families very small, and as we sped along the interstate, the rumble-voiced motor coach sang a lonely lullaby to the accompaniment of its humming tires. Despite my mind’s chaotic jumping and the stress of the morning, my head fell to my chest and I was overcome by an exhausted sleep.
I woke reluctantly as the bus ran over a seam in the road. Ahead of me, arms popped out of seats whose occupants had also been roused, and their owners yawned and stretched and began to murmur quietly among themselves. We entered a city. I leaned my cheek against the coolness of the window, waiting for a road sign, but I didn’t need one. The ivory needle of the Washington Monument grew taller on the horizon, and a little further, the dome of the U.S. Capitol building. As a history buff, I laughed inwardly at the irony that I found the landmarks more interesting as a sign of our proximity to the airport rather than as symbols of our national heritage, especially since I’d never before seen them. My neck ached and I wanted to get out and walk the stiffness out of my legs.
The stark white of the capitol’s dome against a slate gray sky was not the only contrast that drew my attention through the panorama of my window view. In the foreground of those storied monuments, manifestations of American power and government, neglected neighborhoods languished row on row, different versions of the same scene flickering like an antique film through the fences that lined the way. Black shadows of men in tattered coats gathered in the entryways of neighborhood liquor stores, clutching brown paper bags like dark stubborn sentries at the gates of a blighted kingdom. Helping hands, if they looked for any, must have been far removed, and certainly did not come from a government that chose instead to spend its billions on an endless, meandering war declared only against the intangible concept of terror. There had been another similarly named war fought here, too, during the Johnson administration: one on poverty. But that one had never been as well funded as the current conflict, and judging by the scenery, had ended in defeat. For a long time, it seemed, the men had resigned themselves to being forgotten.
The sentries who greeted us at the airport were tightly permed, white-haired old ladies in blue vests. One kind grandmother handed me a sandwich baggie stocked with toothpaste and baby wipes, bidding me a teary good-bye as if I were her own son. I could not help feeling like an imposter. In her lifetime she may well have sent off her natural-born son to Korea or Vietnam. Perhaps she had lost him and searched now for a glimpse of his face in our uniformed host to soften her pain. It was an oddly awkward sendoff, and I, for one, could shed no sympathetic tears for such well-meaning strangers. I felt only embarrassment, not as a hero deserving of the applause showered on us by these silver haired Samaritans and their parchment-skinned hands. Our uniforms drew stares and whispers from the civilian travelers around us. I blended as best I could into the anonymous parade of brown boots and backpacks as we negotiated the gauntlet of security and settled in for the long flights ahead.
From Baltimore we flew to ports first in England, Germany, and finally to an Air Force base in Qatar, waking only to change planes as there was little else to do but sit and wait. The relative comfort of traveling on commercial airliners as opposed to the military transports we might normally have expected had done little to prevent the stiff joints I rubbed on the way into a vast hangar cooled by extremely loud, giant industrial fans. Long wooden benches arranged in rows had long since been worn smooth by thousands of numb bottoms. I dozed with my head back on my Kevlar helmet pillow, halfway between consciousness and coma, occasionally scratching the backs of my fingernails over the shadow of an oily sandpaper beard that had since our departure begun to sprout relentlessly from my chin.
The instructions of some half-inaudible announcement blaring over the intercom startled me from my fitful nap. I strained to discern them, but no one else seemed to pay much attention. Through my boots I could feel the vibration of the concrete hangar floor as it shook under the prop blast of our long-anticipated transport to Iraq, a C-130 military cargo plane. I shuffled sleepily up the lowered tail ramp through a warm pungent breeze of kerosene fumes, wedged myself into place on a red nylon web seat, and grabbed the two ends of my seatbelt before the man in line behind me sat down and pinned me in. We shared tight quarters, shoulder to shoulder with our backs against the skin of the aircraft, even tighter now that we all wore helmets and body armor. A line of sand-colored shipping containers that stored the company’s equipment walled off the central aisle. I stared intently into the depthless panel of the one in front of me until it hurt my eyes, and as the plane droned on, my head dropped again into unconsciousness.
The man beside me nudged me awake as he readjusted himself to don his helmet. Burning bulbs studded at intervals along its length bathed the bay in a blood-red glow. Loudspeakers crackled with the proclamation that we had entered Iraqi airspace. An air of whispery restlessness swirled throughout the cabin.
I clutched the edge of my seat as the aircraft began a steep descent. The pilot nosed down sharply, trying to limit our potential exposure to enemy surface-to-air fire. Outside, the normal low buzzing of the props rose to a high-pitched whine and the rising G forces pushed me low in my seat. Just when I began to feel sick, our angle of approach leveled off sharply and the plane’s tires bumped tarmac with a screech. My neighbors’ shoulders mashed into mine as the engines roared in full reverse. As we came to a stop, an audible collective sigh of relief accompanied the metallic screeching of brakes, with the realization we’d landed safely in Iraq at the Marine Corps’ Al Asad Air Base without any extra holes in the airplane. Or maybe ours was a sigh of resignation. We’d crossed our Rubicon. There could be no turning back for many months.
No lights were visible outside as the black hole above the ramp opened on a starless void, but it was not an empty darkness. At the edge of the airfield I could just make out the shadowy silhouettes of several open-backed cargo Humvees, and as we filed closer under the burden of our rucksacks, their occupants dismounted to approach us. The drivers wore night vision goggles tilted up on their helmets. I hoped they could see better than I the winding curves and dark high walls of the canyon road we sped along on the way to an uncertain destination.
My eyes flashed open as though my dream had suddenly stopped playing on a television set gone unexpectedly dark during a thunderstorm. A puff of fine white dust hung in the air around the door jamb of our small white room, set adrift by the pressure wave of an explosion that still echoed in the distance.
I propped myself up on an elbow and turned to reassure myself the rest of my team was alright. Cat, the leader of our small team, sat already awake and dressed on his bed across the room, watching a movie on his laptop computer. He seemed unperturbed as he noticed my startled reaction and adjusted his baseball cap. He had been to Iraq before, during the invasion, so I grudgingly accepted his assurance the noise had been only outgoing artillery and nothing to worry about. Josh, our driver, woke at the same time. He pulled his scratchy military-issue blanket over his head and sank back on his bunk bed in the corner. He lay motionless for a minute, then groggily threw his legs over the edge of the mattress and climbed down to the floor and slid his feet into a pair of rubber sandals. He flipped a towel over his shoulder and shuffled to the door with slow inaccurate steps, lifting a hand to shield his eyes as he cracked the door. A thick wave of hot air rolled off the gravel pathway outside and washed over me, filling my nose with the scent of dry, ancient dust.
It had been hot in Qatar, too, in the days before we’d finally reached Iraq, and felt hotter because the desert sun’s baking rays radiated back from every blindingly white surface. The omnipresent concrete bunkers, the crushed, monochromatic gravel paving the whole world to the horizon, even the sky itself seemed covered with a film of powdery sand that made the kilometer-long trek to the chow hall seem akin to walking through a painfully brilliant field of freshly fallen snow. Iraq seemed only slightly better.
The heat rushed over my face and brought back childhood memories of standing at my mother’s side, eagerly looking into the oven as she checked her baking. Here though, the heat lasted forever and there were no cookies to look forward to afterward.
I lay on my side and rubbed morning grit from my eyes, taking in the unadorned white sheet-metal walls of my bedroom. During the night I had stumbled through darkness and collapsed on the first empty mattresses my outstretched hand could find. The bed was cheap-looking foam but not uncomfortable compared to the airport floors and bench seats of the previous few days. No other furniture decorated the room save for two bunk beds and another single bed, one in each corner. One of the top bunks still wore its factory wrapping of clear plastic. A fine layer of baby powder-like dust frosted every flat surface. Where we’d stepped, our boot prints stitched the floor like tracks of wild game across a muddy riverbank.
I yawned and glanced back over at Cat. He looked every bit the New Yorker he proudly proclaimed himself to be, stereotypically brash and Italian, with dark curly hair and frequently voiced opinions. To hear him tell it, one would think he hailed from the mean streets of Little Italy, but in actuality, he’d grown up in a small town upstate. Under his cap, his hair still glistened with dampness. I wondered what the showers were like.
Even through the rubber soles of my flip flops, the ground warmed my feet as I crunched through the gravel toward the shower trailer. On the way I passed Josh, towel in hand. He raised his eyebrows and gave me a look I couldn’t quite interpret, as if I should prepare myself for something unpleasant. But the shower proved refreshing, if rather Spartan and public.
At least it existed; I could be thankful for that. Who knew what the facilities would be like outside the main base?
Morning rituals completed, the three of us stepped outside the room dressed in our desert camouflage, and Cat locked our door with the only key we’d been given. A couple of guys from the detachment already waited, sitting on the wooden pallets that served as porches in front of our line of trailers, smoking cigarettes. The warm air hovered around us, unusually stagnant. Exhaled smoke hung in a wispy veil in the alley way. Further down, someone had strung a laundry line across the walkway that sagged under the weight of dusty wet clothes, sure to be dry soon. I recalled an illustration from a National Geographic story about shanty towns.
I heard footsteps at the mouth of the alley behind me and turned to see Gerry, our detachment chief, approaching with a set of keys in his hand. He had deployed early to Iraq as part of the advance party to arrange for the arrival of the rest of the detachment, so it was the first time we had seen him in nearly two weeks. Those of us who were newly arrived stood to meet him and exchanged greetings and handshakes in turn. He looked tired and serious, perhaps a bit grayer than before, but a spark in his eye betrayed his good mood and delight in seeing us together again. As usual, though, we were expected elsewhere, and Gerry cut the conversation short to lead us to a nearby lot bordered by a low wall of earth-filled wire and felt boxes called HESCO barriers, named for the Hercules Engineering Solutions Consortium, which produced them.. Weaving a path between armored Humvees and a hodgepodge of decrepit-looking civilian vehicles, we stopped beside a dust-covered passenger van and waited for Gerry to unlock the doors. It was stifling inside. The boss flipped a switch and a feeble flow of lukewarm air puffed from the vents.
I leaned against my window in the middle seat, feeling the hot breeze on my skin and trying to memorize the route. The same shade of dull grayish tan painted land, road, lampposts, and bushes the color of the plume of dust kicked up by the van, except where other vehicles’ tires had scrubbed the dust from the road. The two black ribbons of asphalt stretched past a repetitive panorama of the skeletons of dead trees and unremarkable flat roofed buildings. We passed a row of shrapnel-pocked airplane hangars nestled inside man-made valleys along a broad runway, witness to the attacks early in the war that had crippled Saddam’s air forces. Scattered at intervals in the distance, the broken noses of MiG fighters from those hangars poked out from berms of sand bulldozed around them in a vain attempt to hide them from American bombs.
The van slowed to take a sharp corner around a pair of portable toilets and rolled to a stop in a parking lot hidden within the courtyard of a cluster of the same type of flat-roofed concrete buildings. Carefully stacked sandbags blocked their deep-silled windows. Arabic slogans and colorful murals of Iraqi pilots and jets in flight decorated the stucco walls on both sides of the entry way. Gerry noted casually that the building had once been a training facility for officers of the Iraqi Air Force, recently reconfigured to serve as Tactical PSYOP Detachment 950’s headquarters in the Anbar province. Two T-shirt-clad soldiers stood on the roof, waving for us to enter. One of them had been a roommate of mine during language school. I flashed a smile and waved back.
The ceiling impressed me most. It was dim inside, and my eyes took a few seconds to readjust from the bright sunlight. Once they did, I admired the intricate geometric patterns cut into the plaster of the ceiling and hidden behind crudely built plywood shelves stocked with boxes of Kool-Aid powder and paperback novels. Mosaic tiled floors still shone with tarnished elegance beneath my boots. An unlit and slightly damaged crystal chandelier rather ironically decorated the next room.
From the doorway, an unfamiliar black captain with a glistening bald head motioned for us to follow him to a corner dominated by a large map of western Iraq. Judging by his mannerisms I could sense his eagerness to deliver his presentation. I suppose it was just that he looked forward to finally going home. The briefing marked a milestone that signaled the end of his deployment, and the beginning of mine. The same restless energy emanated from a group of fifteen or so soldiers already gathered around the map, some of them members of my detachment, others veterans of the outgoing detachment curious to see the faces of the men who would take their place.
In spite of the unspoken significance it held for both groups, the meeting was unduly long and uninteresting. Nothing we hadn’t heard a hundred times before in the situation reports and cultural studies we had pored over in the months prior to arrival. The captain with the shiny head asked if we had any questions. There were none.
My leg had fallen asleep from leaning back on a countertop. I followed the rest of the group back outside into the sun-baked parking lot, clumping along woodenly as the sensation returned to my limb. One of the other detachment’s soldiers waited behind a disassembled M2 machine gun he had just removed from the turret of a nearby Humvee.
The M2 had been used in World War II as aircraft armament. I hefted the yard-long detached barrel in my hands, surprised by its heft. It was the first time since basic training I had even seen a “Ma Deuce,” as we sometimes called the gun. At our base in North Carolina, we never trained on the heavy guns because there were none in the unit’s inventory. Similarly, the soft-skinned Humvees we were accustomed to driving were nothing like the beast parked on the curb before us, squat under the weight of its own armor.
Ordinarily the only armament atop our loudspeaker trucks at that time was the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), a normally hand-carried, belt-fed machine gun firing a .223 (5.56mm) cartridge, a caliber commonly used by squirrel hunters and the standard for NATO infantry. It was intentionally small, designed to maim rather than kill and had come into the American inventory with the adoption of the M16 rifle during the Vietnam War. Many of the men in our company vocally resented the fact we weren’t equipped with more powerful weapons to defend our vehicles. I hoped when we got to wherever we were going, we could convince the armorer to lend us a heavier weapon, but in the interim I would have to content myself with learning how to care for this one first.
The instructor called our attention to a white bed sheet laid on the ground in front of him, on which he had arranged the black shining entrails of the gun in neat rows. It was hard to imagine how everything went back together, there were so many pieces. They did though, simply enough, and in an hour or two we had all mastered disassembling and reassembling the heavy weapon, loading, cleaning, and the technique of using a small flat tool to verify the proper space between the barrel and receiver.
When class ended, we retired to the shade of the headquarters building and thirstily gulped down bottles of cool water and powdered flavor drinks. I wandered the premises alone, investigating the building’s dark corners and jumbled piles of boxes. From the open back doorway I heard cheers and sounds of a scuffle. Back home, the detachment had instituted a traditional friendly brawl we called “Match of the Day” to pass time when we were bored. The latest was apparently underway. I walked outside sipping my water and joined the ring forming around the two combatants. They were both soaked with sweat, their uniforms wrinkled and sand-spattered. We observers shouted over each other with suggestions how each fighter could better subdue his opponent. After an intense but indecisive struggle, one of their noses dripped blood and Gerry stopped the match to prevent the friendly contest from turning serious.
During my tour of the building, before being distracted by the brawl outside, I had seen stairs I wanted to follow. With the fighters weary and resting, a few other soldiers and I climbed to the roof to take in the surrounding view. On the road below, a shapely blonde Marine in short shorts ran past with her working dog, a German shepherd. From what I could see of the trash fires and rubble in the other three directions, she was the best scenery we would glimpse in a long time.
I woke up sweating. I lay motionless in bed, reluctant to move, beads of sweat trickling down my ribcage the way rain runs off a windshield. It had been weeks since I had been able to sleep in so late, and with the uncomfortable outdoor heat blistering through the thin metal wall of my bedroom, I wondered how I’d managed to, smothered as I was in my soaked bed sheets. The electricity must have gone out some time ago, and the air conditioner stood silent. Our room seemed eerily quiet without the usual constant humming, save for Josh’s slow, measured breaths.
I stepped outside, being careful not to make too much noise. A cooling breeze provided some relief. It was actually hotter inside than out. I sat down on the edge of the wooden pallet and lay back with my eyes closed as the dry breeze blew up my shorts. The sun-soaked boards felt good through my T-shirt, but I could not relax. It was quiet enough to think, and I felt very far from home.
At the end of the alleyway, air conditioning units starting coming back on one by one and the surge of power rapidly reached the unit above my head. The fan clattered back to life. My moment of Zen gone, I exhaled deeply and went back inside to get my soap and towel.
While waiting for everyone else to get ready, I opened the lid of the black plastic footlocker I used to store my gear. My earlier moment of homesickness had made me thirsty for sun tea, the way my mother fixed it during my childhood. In the summers of my youth, she put a handful of tea bags in a glass jar painted with yellow flowers, and left it on the front porch to brew in the sun. I impatiently watched the water darken, but she always told me to wait. But how worthwhile the wait, on those warm Montana summer days, when at last I had an ice-filled glass, sweet and bitter at the same time. I’d learned to love her tea. When I made it myself, it reminded me of the carefree happiness I once knew.
I found the box of Lipton’s under a folded stack of uniforms and pulled out two pouches. I folded the bags in half and stuffed them inside a plastic water bottle, leaving the strings out and screwing the top back on to hold them in place. I smiled to myself, tasting the memory of tea and wondering what sort of comments the guys would make when they walked back from the shower and saw my murky bottle sitting in the gravel outside my doorway.
The detachment’s eleven o’clock appointment was with a Marine Corps master gunner, an expert in weapons and the fundamentals of rifle marksmanship. As with every unit arriving in the Iraqi theater, ours fulfilled a number of mandatory training requirements during the reception and integration period. The long list included a review of the rules of engagement, the laws of war, prohibited targets, Iraqi customs, and weapons drills. Gerry led us on a short hike past the chow hall and a line of ubiquitous low tan buildings, stopping at one with a camouflage net draped over the doorway. He directed us to a classroom lined with benches made from two-by-fours and left to find our instructor.
Master Guns finally arrived and sniffed into the room swaddled in the airy, condescending aloofness of a man proud of his rank. We reciprocated by politely pretending we weren’t bored out of our minds reviewing the same material for the thirtieth time.
Maybe the army and Marine Corps were not so different after all.
When he finished, our instructor gave us a time to come back the next day, so we might put what we had learned into practice at the rifle range.
It was dusk, and buggy. Sand flies, clouds of them, preferred the evening’s cooler temperatures. With every step back to my trailer, the tiny pests darted around my face and bit my neck. I slapped reflexively to kill them and walked with Josh down the alley to the interpreters’ trailer, next to our own.
I had been trained in Korean as part of my coursework after graduating the Psychological Operations course and had gotten more proficient during several deployments to Korea. Unfortunately my language skills were nowhere near to qualifying me as a translator, and even if I had been any good, knowing the language didn’t help me in Iraq.
After years of war, most of the battalion’s few Arabic-trained speakers had already been on multiple deployments. In an attempt to make the deployment cycle more equitable for all soldiers, the Fourth PSYOP Group began to transfer members from battalions that usually dealt with Europe, South America, and Asia into the solitary tactical battalion. Charlie Company, my company, was mostly composed of soldiers freshly drafted from these other battalions. Even those few soldiers in the company who had been through the Arabic course were not very adept in communicating with native Arabic speakers, so we were forced to rely on translators.
Without them, the ability to accomplish our assigned mission would have been very limited. Our task as Psychological Operations specialists was to influence the behavior and emotions of the Iraqi public into accepting America’s occupation of their country, and in every conceivable forum, covert and overt, whether in leaflets, conversation, radio, newspapers, or the internet, we needed to be able to convey our messages in the language of our target audience. The cultural expertise and cooperation of our native translators lent more legitimacy to our presence and our propaganda than anything else we could have ever claimed to do.
The door to the interpreters’ room hung open, wagging slightly on silent hinges. A tall olive-skinned man with dark, deep-set eyes stood in the doorway smoking a cigarette. He cracked a wry smile, inviting Josh and me into the circle of men huddled cross-legged around a game of gin rummy on the floor. The space was colorfully decorated with landscape posters and a large oriental rug. In the corner, a small electric teapot whistled merrily. The man with the hollow eyes offered us a glass of tea.
The swirling flakes of my strong, dark drink settled to the bottom of my tiny glass. My new friend poured a generous helping of sugar from an unmarked paper bag into his own cup and offered me the rest.
We shared introductions, played cards, and joked. The men had been soldiers in Saddam’s army, and students, and fathers. They were reserved in sharing their opinions of the political problems their country faced, but it couldn’t be denied they were hospitable.
The rest were not so sinister looking as the man with the sunken eyes. I can only imagine the scenes that passed before those eyes to make them so joyless, but even in the relaxed setting he seemed restless and brooding, mostly watching the others. I usually prided myself on being open to unfamiliar cultures, but couldn’t help secretly wondering about the loyalty and motives of these men, whose paths had led them to collaboration with an army that had so recently overthrown their own government.
One troll-like, hunchbacked man called himself “John,” adding with a chuckle that in Arabic, “John” sounded like the word for ghost. He maintained a yellow-toothed smile while relating the story of how his entire family had been murdered by Saddam’s regime. With an evil cackle he told me he hoped for revenge, and would kill any Sunnis he met if he had the chance. Later I learned John wore a ski mask when he worked, but I wonder if it was less to disguise his haggard face from those who would harm him than to hide his sectarian contempt.
One man did seem genuinely happy, a university student whose studies had been interrupted by the war. “Rick” sported a goatee, uncommon among his peers. Most other Iraqi men wore moustaches. He kept a bandanna wrapped around a thick head of curly black hair. His eyes shone behind his glasses with a flash of worldliness and intelligence, even optimism.
When we tired of cards, one of the men turned on the television and we watched the beginning of a poorly bootlegged movie with Arabic captions. Occasionally a silhouette of one of the theater patrons walked across the bottom of a tilted screen. The muddled sound made the story hard to follow. But in spite of the movie’s laughably poor quality, the television flickered with the glow of normalcy. I hadn’t watched one in ages, and everywhere I turned stared back another strange reminder of the distance from home. Even so, it wasn’t long before the novelty wore off and my mind began to wander, worrying more about the unforeseen challenges of the deployment ahead and the home in the States I might never see again than with following the plot of the movie. I excused myself politely and left for bed.
Morning broke as it usually did, quickly. I rose early and walked to the shower trailer by the light of a predawn glow, but by the time I finished, the air already stirred with heat. Doors along the alley way opened and slammed shut as the other soldiers of the detachment readied themselves for the day ahead. Master Guns would be waiting for us at the rifle range, and he was not a man who would be pleased about being kept waiting. After a hurried breakfast we squeezed into our vans with arms full of armor and rifles and drove toward the base of a tall cliff at the perimeter of the camp, passing an abandoned blue-domed mosque and shady rows of olive trees.
An empty range greeted our arrival. No Master Guns, no vehicles, just a broad expanse of flat, bare ground and a long line of square wooden target frames waiting silently at the base of a sand berm. We parked the vans and clambered into the sunlight, wondering if perhaps we were not in the right place. The scant shade of a stand of date palms beckoned. We milled about there unconcerned, while the smokers puffed their cigarettes, but did not have to wait long. A convoy of armored Humvees approached from the opposite direction and backed into position to form a neat line on one side of the parking area. Master Guns emerged from the lead vehicle and gathered his Marines in a horseshoe formation around him while another group hurried to set up paper silhouettes in the target frames.
After briefing safety procedures and explaining how the range would operate, he directed everyone to the back of one of the Humvees that guarded the ammunition so we could load our magazines.
Master Guns demonstrated how we should approach the targets. He advanced toward the line in a smooth crouch, rifle leveled. With his arms hooked under his rifle, his intent stare, and the crouching gait, he reminded me of a Tyrannosaurus rex stalking its prey. After several dry runs proved our understanding of the technique, we graduated to using live ammunition.
Master Guns referred to the exercise as a failure drill, so called because it ensured the failure of the heart, lung, and brain functions of the individuals we mimed shooting. On command I walked forward, firing two shots into the chest and one in the head of the target in rapid succession each time Master Guns blew his whistle. The most cynical members of our detachment referred to the technique as putting “two in the heart, one in the mind,” a callous affirmation of the challenges that faced a force charged with winning over the hearts and minds of a nation resentful of its occupation by foreign troops. Again and again we repeated the same movements, building muscle memory and reinforcing our performance of the drill as an automatic response.
On breaks I drank entire liter bottles of body-temperature water. Stinging sweat ran into my eyes from under my helmet. By the time we were released from the range around four in the afternoon I felt numb, as if all the electrolytes had drained from my body. My muscles were sore from the weight of my armor and the last remnants of my energy rapidly evaporated in the oppressive heat.
I splashed a handful of water onto my face and neck.
I hope I get used to this heat.
I would have taken off my armor before getting back in the van, but it was easier to wear it on the walk back to the room than carry it. As soon as I crossed the threshold I released the Velcro closure on my chest and let the vest slide onto the floor with a thud. My uniform top could not have been more soaked if someone poured a bucket of salty water over me. I peeled it off and lay back on my bed bare-chested, boots and all, closed my eyes and reveled in the beautiful coolness of the air conditioning.
Two hours later Gerry opened the door and stepped inside to inform us he had gotten word our team had been assigned to support the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, a unit of reservists from Ohio, and we should be leaving for their base at the Haditha Dam sometime the next day. Cat would need to find space on a convoy. Josh and I looked at each other, wordless, but with mutual understanding. We both knew that tomorrow, everything would be different. For us, the war was just beginning.